58 pages • 1 hour read
Hervé Le Tellier, Transl. Adriana HunterThe Anomaly
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 14-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Life Is a Dream, They Say”
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “The Moment When”
Part II covers the events of June 24 through 26, 2021. On June 24, the passengers of the second Air France 006 disembark the airplane and are processed by soldiers at McGuire Air Force Base. They are placed in a converted hangar, provided food and bathrooms, and then interviewed by PsyOps psychologists following a script provided by Adrian and Tina. The soldiers prohibit the passengers from contacting the outside world and monitor social media to keep the existence of the plane and its passengers a secret as long as possible.
In the meantime, biologists compare the DNA of the passengers with their counterparts, who are now under surveillance elsewhere, while engineers study the two airplanes; both sets are found to be identical. The passengers who landed on March 10 are older; two have died in the meantime, and another has since given birth. With video evidence from the two airplanes, the Protocol 42 security team pinpoints the moment the original Air France 006 is copied “like a photocopier” (161). General Silveria asks Adrian and Tina for theories; Adrian and Tina request a workspace, anti-sleep pills, a coffee machine, and more scientists to help them, including Adrian’s romantic interest, Meredith Harper.
Amid the chaos, Blake creates a diversion by starting a fire, escaping the hangar before his DNA can be tested. He steals a car and ditches one identity for another. He discovers that the passwords to his bank accounts have been changed and, after checking Facebook, that there is someone who looks identical to him living his life in Paris. He books a flight to Europe.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary: “Seven Interviews”
PsyOps interviews each of the June passengers. The agents ask each person to describe the events of the flight and to confirm where they were born, intentionally naming the wrong city to prompt the passenger to correct it. They also ask a series of questions Adrian and Tina stole from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The questions include whether they have been hearing strange sounds or having unexplained headaches. They ask Victor Miesel about The Anomaly and Slimboy about “Yaba Girls,” and neither recognizes the work because neither has come up with the idea yet.
Each passenger reacts to the questions differently. David questions the questioning agent’s behavior. André asks the agent to contact his friend in French counterintelligence. Joanna refuses to answer questions on legal grounds. Lucie spends the time asking someone to get in touch with her son, Louis. Victor recognizes the questions from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and thinks the whole thing is a joke. When the agent questions Sophia, they alter the questions to account for her age. When Sophia draws a disturbing picture of herself with her father, the agents bring someone else in the room to ask follow-up questions.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary: “Descartes 2.0”
On June 25, Adrian explains the situation again to the now 40 experts gathered at McGuire Air Force Base. Two hours later, Adrian reports to the Protocol 42 task force and the US president on video call. He explains that they have come up with three hypotheses. The first is a wormhole; using science-fiction examples, Adrian attempts to explain string theory and the concept of the Einstein-Rosen bridge—a hypothetical connection between different points in space-time. But a wormhole does not explain the duplication. The second theory is the use of a super-advanced biological 3D printer, in which case the March plane would be considered the copy and the June plane the original. But that theory would require that such a copier exists.
The most plausible theory is the Bostrom hypothesis, which suggests that the reality in which all the characters live is in fact a computer simulation. Adrian introduces Arch Wesley, a logician from Columbia University, to explain the Bostrom hypothesis in detail. The president, who is described as stupid and religious, becomes frustrated by the lecture and only understands a reference to The Matrix. Wesley explains that before Air France 006, he considered the simulation theory to be theoretically possible based solely on probability, but that after Air France 006, he is now completely convinced of its accuracy. Wesley predicts that they are being tested and, if they fail, whoever is running the simulation might shut it down.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary: “Table 14”
Some of the June passengers sit around a table. Victor Miesel writes about the activity in the hangar; he reflects that he doesn’t trust metaphors and is interested instead in writing about the lives of others. He meets Lucie and André but fails to strike up a meaningful conversation with either. David Markle has changed out of his Air France uniform to avoid presenting himself as an authority, since he doesn’t know any more about the situation than the rest of the passengers. Slimboy has found his guitar and is now composing a new song titled “Beautiful Men in Uniform.” A young actress, not yet named, rehearses lines for the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Joanna collects signatures for a class-action lawsuit against the US air force regarding their detainment, and Sophia’s mother, April, worries that her signature might get her army husband, Clark, in trouble.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary: “E Pur, Si Muove”
Agent Jamy Pudlowski and her PsyOps team meet with a group of religious leaders at the White House. The group includes representatives from every major religion as well as the president and his spiritual leaders by video call. Jamy herself doesn’t believe in or care about religion in any way. For that reason, she specializes in religious issues for PsyOps. She explains that human beings have been identically duplicated and asks the room whether an identical copy of a person would be considered “a divine creation” (214). After arguing, the leaders conclude that such a person must either be “a creature of God or a creature who feels the presence of Buddha” (220). Jamy then asks whether this person would be considered to have a soul, and the leaders argue for another two hours. Nothing is definitively settled, but in the end, everyone agrees to release a joint statement designed to protect any such copied persons “from any criminal act inspired by a misreading of sacred texts” (220).
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary: “Hangar”
General Silveria and Jamy Pudlowski watch the passengers in the hangar and discuss what they have been able to glean from the surveillance. Some of the passengers dance to pass the time. Joanna collects signatures for her class-action lawsuit. Nobody knows the identity of the escaped passenger, because Blake flew from Paris under the false identity of Michael Weber, managed to avoid the cameras on the airplane, and left before the surveillance system was set up in the hangar.
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary: “Meredith’s Questions”
Meredith and Adrian both hate the idea of being a simulation and try to come up with ways to disprove the theory. They question whether their history is real and whether they have free will. Meredith wonders to what end their reality has been simulated and proposes increasingly ridiculous reasons. She suggests that if their lives are simulated, their afterlives can be, too, each according to one’s religion. Despite all her anger at the situation, Meredith thanks Adrian for inviting her along. Adrian, meanwhile, believes that the duplication of Air France 006 is some kind of test, but he is so infatuated by Meredith that he doesn’t care; they dance together before Silveria tells Adrian he is expected at the White House.
Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary: “A Few Presidents”
The US president calls Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, and informs him of the situation. Adrian presents their hypotheses and answers Jinping’s questions. They provide the names of the Chinese nationals who were aboard Air France 006. Then Adrian and the US president do the same thing with President Emmanuel Macron of France.
In China, Jinping meets with his advisers. They already have surveillance data on Air France 006 and are watching McGuire Air Force Base via satellite. A year ago, the same phenomenon occurred with a flight from Beijing to Shenzhen, and China continues to hold those 322 passengers captive at the Huiyang military air base. They also believe that the simulation theory is the most probable, but they decide not to share what they know with the Americans.
Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary: “‘The People Have the Right to Know’”
Three days after the second Air France 006 landed, The New York Times runs a story about a Boeing 787 being held by the military at McGuire Air Force Base. Witnesses confirm that there are over 200 passengers held captive in a hangar, but the reporter cannot explain how an extra Air France 787 exists or why one of Air France’s planes is currently undergoing multiple tests. The CDC states that they do not know of any containment emergency, and both the French and American governments deny holding people against their will. The meeting of religious leaders at the White House has also leaked, and now multiple media outlets are sending journalists to investigate. Rumors are spreading of mysterious arrests and renowned scientists who have suddenly gone missing.
The passengers of the March flight have been gathered as “requisitions related to national security” (248) and are now being held in a separate hangar at McGuire Air Force Base. A team of FBI psychologists prepare the passengers to “meet their… doubles” (249).
Part 2, Chapters 14-22 Analysis
Le Tellier’s The Anomaly is a pastiche of multiple literary genres, but at its center, the novel is a thought experiment—a way to pose questions about the nature of reality and the relationship between Reality and Artifice. By placing a large cast of characters—each with their own unique life circumstances and personality—in an impossible situation, the novel tests a range of possible reactions to the impossible. The religious leaders who debate whether the duplicated passengers have souls, determining finally that each duplicate person is “either a child of God or one who feels the presence of the Buddha”—a real human, in other words—dramatize one of the epistemic shockwaves that ripple out from the center of this inexplicable event (220). Of course, the opposite conclusion is equally plausible—that if these duplicates are not children of God, neither is anyone else. Any threat to The Myth of the Unique Self is a threat to the very foundation of nearly every religion, and thus the clerics must quickly assign full personhood to the duplicates or face the obliteration of everything they believe. The scientists—who must now consider that their investigations into the nature of reality were actually investigations into the arbitrary parameters of a computer program—face a different kind of epistemic crisis: Their scientific episteme—the set of rules for determining what constitutes knowledge and how it may be verified—must undergo a fundamental reorientation.
Part II of the novel defines the metaphysical problem and shows religious leaders and scientists debating the moral and philosophical implications of Air France 006 in the days before the news becomes public. In style, these chapters alternate between that of a philosophical treatise and that of an outlandish Hollywood blockbuster film, as often the more serious metaphysical questions are replaced by denial or selective ignorance. The meaninglessness implied by the simulation theory is often too much to bear. The title of Chapter 18, “E Pur, Si Muove,” meaning “and yet it moves,” references Galileo’s words after he was forced to recant his observations that planets revolve around the sun. It gestures to a tension between pretending that nothing has changed and acknowledging the reality that everything the characters believed in has been invalidated.
The Optimistic Self-Delusion many of the novel’s characters indulge in—choosing to ignore or deny the implications of flight 006 rather than reckoning with them—resembles the human response to other crises such as climate change and overpopulation. Le Tellier describes the response from world leaders to Air France 006 as compromised by mutual distrust and ineffectual personality—especially the US president, a buffoonish evangelical Republican who resembles a combination of Donald Trump and former vice president Mike Pence. Rather than act on the news, these world leaders enact policies to protect the status quo. Le Tellier portrays these scenes with a sense of comedy, suggesting that governments in the real world, especially since 2016, have become indistinguishable from tragicomic fiction.
The “simulation theory” that arises as an explanation for the anomaly of flight 006 raises further questions about the relationship between Reality and Artifice. If reality is a simulation, it’s unclear what this means about the existence of free will. The characters may be thinking and choosing for themselves within parameters set by the simulation’s designers, or it may be that their sense of free will is only another illusion programmed into them by the simulation. The realization that the novel itself is another kind of simulation further complicates this question, as it’s clear that, as characters in a novel, they do not have free will. Their will is an illusion created by an author who in reality makes all their choices for them. In this way, the characters face questions about how they exist in their world—questions that closely parallel the questions a literary theorist might ask about how characters exist within a fiction. This parallel is another metafictional aspect of the book, asking readers to immerse themselves in the story while remaining conscious of its artificial, constructed nature.
The character of Victor Miesel is both a stand-in for the author and a character who struggles with the idea that he is a copy of others. Victor worries that he lacks originality, that he merely copies the styles of other authors and cannot “break free of influences” (200). Le Tellier, imitating different literary genres, is also copying the styles of other authors. Because The Anomaly so clearly resembles other fictions, it is impossible to fully forget that it is a work of fiction. Meredith refers to the entire premise as Dr. Strangelove. The scientists reference science-fiction films when explaining their theories, just as the hit man Blake references fictional hit men. When the genres begin to clash during the interviews and as the passengers mingle—as Adrian’s silly Close Encounters of the Third Kind questionnaire leads to the possible discovery of Sophia’s sexual abuse, or as Blake’s action-thriller-style escape inhabits the same space as Joanna collecting signatures on colorful crafting paper—each separate character story seems less and less realistic. Victor’s worries about his own originality also parallel anxieties regarding whether he is just a copy of another Victor or a computer program. And when Victor starts writing a new novel inspired by his circumstances, he wonders if a reader will be able to follow a novel that has a cast of characters as large as Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, thus imagining his own simulation of the Air France 006 passengers and their lives.
